Teaching Kids about Christmas
It’s that time of year again. The time when the Christmas season — at least the version that’s been created by retailers — begins the day after Halloween. It’s hard to look at what has become of Jesus’ birthday. It’s not like it was any better when I was a kid, but at least then they waited until the day after Thanksgiving to begin ramming commercialism down our throats.
As a father, I struggle every year with trying to teach my sons the true values of Christmas. I want them to be excited about getting toys, but I want them to learn about the best gift they could every receive as well. Over at my new favorite blog, The Simple Dollar, Trent has a similar lament brought on by a toy catalog that his nieces and nephews are marking off their Christmas wish list in.
Christmas catalogs encourage materialism in young children. It creates a desire within them for objects, particularly ones that they did not even conceive of wanting before the Christmas catalog came along. In fact, ideas from catalogs can often overshadow other ideas - nowhere in a catalog, for example, can one find books or highly open-ended creative toys.
Trent suggests a solution that allows kids to pick out their toys, without getting the most expensive and least creative ones forced into their consciousness. He shares a plan that a friend of his uses: put out a blank page in late October, and let kids put things on the list as they think of them. They don’t need to look at a catalog to be told what they need. Instead, they make a list of things that come from their imagination.
My oldest son is obsessed with the toy catalogs. He’ll go through and find at least 10 things in each that he wants, all of which he would not have thought of on his own.
I’ve tried to educate him on the way advertisements work on your brain to convince you of things you might not really believe, and he’s pretty good at noticing it in TV ads.
But for some reason, the toy catalog has full control over him. I think I’ll try to curb his access to them for the rest of this year, and try to keep him away from them altogether next year.